Price shocks waiting as US abandons helium business

The US government controls the world's largest stockpile of helium. When …

Robert Richardson got a Nobel Prize for creating a superfluid comprised of chilled helium. But he started his talk at the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting by announcing that he'd be focusing purely on science policy—policy related to his work, given that the policy in question is the one that governs much of the world's stockpile of helium.

Because of how the US is privatizing its stock of the gas, prices are artificially low, which is encouraging a pattern of consumption that may leave us without significant supplies of the gas midway through the century.

Inert but interesting

Why is that significant? Richardson started by describing helium's more interesting properties, which are key to its commercial use. These include its chemistry—his slide led with the text, "helium has no chemistry; it is a mere placeholder between hydrogen and lithium on the periodic table." Being completely inert may seem rather dull, but for industries that work with highly reactive materials, this absence of chemistry can be essential.

Helium also has the highest thermal conductivity of any gas and is transparent to neutrons, which means it plays a key role in the design of next-generation nuclear reactor technology. It also has the lowest boiling point of any gas, which makes it useful for a variety of cooling applications, including keeping the hardware cold enough to superconduct at the Large Hadron Collider.

"It's my favorite element," Richardson said in explaining why he cared so much. "I've made a career studying it."

The light weight of a helium atom, which makes it perfect for party balloons and blimps, is also the key to its scarcity. The Earth simply doesn't exert enough gravitational force to keep it on the planet. Once in the atmosphere, helium will migrate to the stratosphere and be lost to space. All the primordial helium in the Earth's vicinity when it formed is long since gone, and only flukes of geology have given us the opportunity to study it on Earth.

Richardson noted that the only places with significant helium deposits are areas where salt domes have formed above deposits of granite. Over geological time, radioactive decay has released alpha particles—helium nuclei—into these deposits, where they can generally be found in a mixture with natural gas.

By chance, the vast majority of these deposits are located in the US, in the Great Plains and the western states. Most of the other sites where helium can be commercially isolated are facilities that liquify natural gas, which leaves helium as a byproduct.

Government management and mismanagement

Although helium had been detected in the sun back in the mid-1800s, the first deposits were found in a natural gas field in Kansas in 1903. Within two decades, the US military was using helium in dirigible aircraft, which led to it being managed by the government as a strategic resource.

Even as technology changed, helium found new and equally critical roles, first as a component of large balloons that protected ships from air attack in World War II, then to purge rocket fuel tanks before loading them with hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

To ensure a stable supply, the US government gradually built a pipeline system that paralleled the one for natural gas and brought helium to a salt dome for storage. The site, called the Bush Dome for reasons that have nothing to do with the politician, has a liquefaction facility on site and a huge fraction of the world's total supply of helium.

That's where things stood in the mid-1990s, when Congress decided that the US government needed to get out of the business of managing helium. Ostensibly, this would allow market forces to set a price proportionate to its remaining supply, something Richardson indicated he supported.

But Congress dictated that the supply had to be wound down within about 20 years, even though the Bush Dome had enough helium to supply the entire globe for most of a decade, even if all other sources were cut off.

The result has been low prices for the gas even though, at 2008 rates of consumption, we had only a 25-year supply. The good news is that, in the US, usage has stabilized; for instance, argon, which is one percent of the Earth's atmosphere and is equally cheap, has started displacing it in applications like welding.

Helium usage elsewhere has continued to rise, though, driven in part by its artificially low price. Even with the lower rate of use, however, we'll go through the remaining supply within a century.

Richardson's solution is to rework the management of the Bush Dome stockpile once again, this time with the aim of ensuring that helium's price rises to reflect its scarcity. In practical terms, he said that it would be better to deal with a 20-fold increase in price now than to deal with it increasing by a factor of thousands in a few decades when supply issues start to become critical.

But he also made an emotional appeal, stating, "One generation doesn't have the right to determine the availability forever."

Just head to the moon and see if there's any Helium there, and if we can get to the moon to mine it might as well start mining other things while we're out there. Make technologies that don't require Helium or require less Helium. This is FUD based on the assumption that technology will instantly stagnant when the paper is written and consumption will remain exactly the same for the next X decades. Instead of proposing methods of dealing with a shortage he just says "raise the price" which is supposed to magically solve all problems.

he also made an emotional appeal, stating, "One generation doesn't have the right to determine the availability forever."

What a wimp!

Sounds to me like someone wants to create another artificial bubble in a commodity and run the price up on it, then we'll conveniently find another inexhaustible supply to collapse that bubble. Are we really supposed to believe there is a massive shortage in the second most available element in the universe, only behind hydrogen?

Sounds to me like someone wants to create another artificial bubble in a commodity and run the price up on it, then we'll conveniently find another inexhaustible supply to collapse that bubble. Are we really supposed to believe there is a massive shortage in the second most available element in the universe, only behind hydrogen?

the article you obviously didn't read wrote:

The Earth simply doesn't exert enough gravitational force to keep it on the planet. Once in the atmosphere, helium will migrate to the stratosphere and be lost to space. All the primordial helium in the Earth's vicinity when it formed is long since gone, and only flukes of geology have given us the opportunity to study it on Earth.

If the gravitational field of the earth isn't enough to keep it, why would the moon, with 1/6 the gravitational force, be better a better source?

On the Moon, Helium-3 (which is even harder to find on Earth and is mainly made as a byproduct of nuclear technology) is created on the surface by the interaction with the solar wind. The Earth also has an atmosphere that creates a buoyancy force on the light helium gas and lifts in into the upper atmosphere from where it can escape; the Moon has no such active forcing.

Sounds to me like someone wants to create another artificial bubble in a commodity and run the price up on it, then we'll conveniently find another inexhaustible supply to collapse that bubble. Are we really supposed to believe there is a massive shortage in the second most available element in the universe, only behind hydrogen?

If you happen to live inside a star or a gas giant you'll find that helium is indeed abundant. You've got nothing to worry about.

If you happen to live on a terrestrial planet the situation is not quite so rosy.

he also made an emotional appeal, stating, "One generation doesn't have the right to determine the availability forever."

What a wimp!

Sounds to me like someone wants to create another artificial bubble in a commodity and run the price up on it, then we'll conveniently find another inexhaustible supply to collapse that bubble. Are we really supposed to believe there is a massive shortage in the second most available element in the universe, only behind hydrogen?

I suppose you don't have to believe ANY facts surrounding gravitational forces if you're not smart enough to understand them, but then you should leave all the hard decisions, like whether there's a shortage of a gas light enough to simply float out of the gravitiational pull of the Earth, up to the non-neanderthals.

Just because helium is highly abundant in the UNIVERSE doesn't mean it's in high concentration here on Earth.

This is a fairly well-known issue that is coming to light recently due to the increased focus on energy consumption, but I suppose you're one of those people who think energy consumption doesn't matter if global warming isn't real. It's okay, I wouldn't expect you to understand why the two are both separate and related.

There is no reason at all to think that use will decrease. For instance, every hospital in the country needs access to a supply of liquid He. (To cool the superconducting magnets using in MRI machines. And no high temp superconductors are not the answer, they suck for making high field magnets.). The price of He gas is already expected to go up due to increased demand for ultra-high purity gas in the semiconductor industry. He's advocating that we allow the price to reflect the actual market value by the federal government ceasing its dumping of He onto the market. This depresses the ROI to capturing the gas from natural gas refining, which means we are just allowing it to be lost forever.

Part of this solution is to move to pulsed tube coolers where practical and to install integrated He recovery and recompression systems elsewhere and on existing equipment. However, incentive for doing these things likely requires the price of He to increase.

This article is remiss in not mentioning the on going He-3 difficulties. Naturally occurring helium is all He-4, the heavier isotope of He that contains 2 protons and 2 neutrons. Helium-3, produced primarily from H-3 (tritium) decay (in H-bombs), is missing one of those neutrons. Since H-3 has a half life of ~13 years, all of the He-3 found in the world is man made (and it is He-3 mining for fusion rockets that moon mining has been proposed.) He-3 is used in a few things, most notably, low temperature science below 1 kelvin (dilution refrigerators) and neutron detectors. The department of homeland security is now deploying neutron detectors at airports around the country, and their huge demand for He-3 has pushed the price up to > $2000/liter (formerly circa 2005 the price was < $100/liter) if one can find any to purchase at all. This new enormous demand and a decreasing supply due to the (good) global draw down in the number of stored H-bombs and minimal or zero construction of new H-bombs means that the supply issues for He-3 may likely never improve. The cost of running a commerical reactor to produce He-3 is $20,000/liter, which is clearly too high to be practical. A good, recent summary of these issues is here:

I suppose you don't have to believe ANY facts surrounding gravitational forces if you're not smart enough to understand them, but then you should leave all the hard decisions, like whether there's a shortage of a gas light enough to simply float out of the gravitiational pull of the Earth, up to the non-neanderthals.

Perhaps you should go a bit easy on koffein. That statement definitely didn't warrant your answer.

After all the whole article is a bit light on facts and numbers and reeks of scaremongering.

One thing the article mentions for example is that Helium is a byproduct of gas liquification. And we will liquefy a lot of gas in the future. An element doesn't need to be in the atmosphere in pure form to be readily available. As the original poster mentioned Helium is not exactly a rare element.

Also the article fails to mention that the reserve was 1.4billion in debt and a huge helium plant in Algeria was created in the mid 90s with others coming up. (Wikipedia is a better source here than the article isn't it great)

So I have the slight suspicion this article could be a bit more balanced. And it would have much more impact if they would provide some numbers on available helium in the rest of the world and availability through chemical processing. As it stands this looks like hyperbole.

This is all George Bush fault. If his administration hadn't pushed for privatization so that Halliburton and the oil companies could just make money off of his dome, we wouldn't be in this predicament.

One thing the article mentions for example is that Helium is a byproduct of gas liquification. And we will liquefy a lot of gas in the future. An element doesn't need to be in the atmosphere in pure form to be readily available. As the original poster mentioned Helium is not exactly a rare element.

With respect, you misunderstand. The point is that helium IS a rare element on Earth. There is no primordial He in the atmosphere. Any helium that is around (atmospheric He = 5.2 parts per million by volume, c.f. 9340 ppmv for Ar and 210,000 ppmv for O2) is the product of isotope decay in the crust.

There is always more of anything available as wealth and technology move forward.

There is more sperm oil available in the seas than at anytime in the last 150 yearsThere are more proven oil reserves than at any time in the pastThere are more trees in the US than at any time in the last 120 yearsThere are more trees in Japan than at anytime in the last 700 yearsThere are more trees in Europe than at anytime in the last 500 years

So this scare stories about He are just that.

If He becomes expensive enough, people will find ways to capture it at all nuke installations and at all natural gas installations. If it remains cheap, people will keep using it for birthday balloons.

There is always more of anything available as wealth and technology move forward.

There is more sperm oil available in the seas than at anytime in the last 150 yearsThere are more proven oil reserves than at any time in the pastThere are more trees in the US than at any time in the last 120 yearsThere are more trees in Japan than at anytime in the last 700 yearsThere are more trees in Europe than at anytime in the last 500 years

So this scare stories about He are just that.

If He becomes expensive enough, people will find ways to capture it at all nuke installations and at all natural gas installations. If it remains cheap, people will keep using it for birthday balloons.

You're forgetting to consider that 'scare stories' like this one are the reason why people have been able to avert some scarcity disasters and do things like replant forests. Without some concerned conservationists hundreds of years ago rousing people about the plight of the forests, we wouldn't have more trees now.

You seem to be thinking along the lines of the child who wonders why his mother keeps buying food and putting it into the refrigerator. Why bother? After all, the fridge is always full whenever he goes to get something to eat.

Just think, some of us may live to see a day when we can tell children how they used to fill /party balloons/ with helium, it was squandered so badly throughout the 20th century. They'll shake their heads at the incredible waste of helium, to them now extremely rare and valuable, forever lost to space, and wonder at the foolishness of it all.

If the gravitational field of the earth isn't enough to keep it, why would the moon, with 1/6 the gravitational force, be better a better source?

On the Moon, Helium-3 (which is even harder to find on Earth and is mainly made as a byproduct of nuclear technology) is created on the surface by the interaction with the solar wind. The Earth also has an atmosphere that creates a buoyancy force on the light helium gas and lifts in into the upper atmosphere from where it can escape; the Moon has no such active forcing.

He-3 is embedded into the lunar regiolith by the solar wind where it adheres to the mineral ilimnate which is relatively abundant in the lunar anorthosites.

Quote:

to produce roughly 70 tons of helium 3, for example, a million tons of lunar soil would need to be heated to 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius) to liberate the gas, proponents say lunar strip mining is not the goal. "There's enough in the Mare Tranquillitatis alone to last for several hundred years," http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/h ... 00630.html

From the same source...

Quote:

The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tons could supply the entire United States' energy needs for a year, according to Apollo17 astronaut and FTI researcher Harrison Schmitt

Note this abundance estimate is quite a bit higher that that suggested by the wikipedia entry which states that one would need to process 100 million tons of lunar regiolith to get one ton of He-3.

Much Much Much better article. Gives a good summary without the scary bullshit.

Keysentence:"And Russia has the world's largest reserves of natural gas, where helium certainly exists. But there is no push to market it, as, for the short term, supplies are adequate, though increasingly costly."

Summary: Yes helium is in finite supply on earth (like almost everything else), yes it might be intelligent to be a bit more careful with that stuff. But in the end there is quite a bit of it around. All over the world. Definitely not just in the Bush Dome.

And a sentence that definitely makes sense and would have been nice in the article above as well:

""The government had the good vision to store helium, and the question now is: Will industry have the vision to capture it when extracting natural gas, and consumers the wisdom to capture and recycle?" Sobotka said. "This takes long-term vision because present market forces are not sufficient to compel prudent practice.""

But no we will not run out in the forseeable future, no it will not cost a thousand times what it costs now and no this is not George Bush who doomed the world to a sad heliumfree future thereby dooming civilization.

Mm, I foresee this generating another market crisis is the price doesn't reflect it's scarcity. I'd expect helium to be the next lithium for us in the future (along with superconducting materials, superfluids, quantum computing, and all that other exotic stuff), and 20 years seems more than enough for more general use. Imagine the shock when startups (loads of 'em, dot-com style) find prices have suddenly increased by 7000-fold, their business plan ruined, and the loans they bought defaulted. The shock this would be sent to those who loaned them (and loaned them big, I suspect) would be the next dot-com or subprime-mortgage bubble. And that's besides the point that a very valuable resource is no more...

We can only hope at some point in the future fusion projects will produce significant amounts of He as a by product of H. This seems doubtful though and they would likely have to build something specifically to create new He.

We can only hope at some point in the future fusion projects will produce significant amounts of He as a by product of H. This seems doubtful though and they would likely have to build something specifically to create new He.

We can always run the reaction, even if it doesn't produce a surplus of energy, specifically for the purpose of generating helium.... Of course, that's guaranteed to be expensive helium.

We can only hope at some point in the future fusion projects will produce significant amounts of He as a by product of H. This seems doubtful though and they would likely have to build something specifically to create new He.

The point about nuclear fusion is that you get colossal amounts of energy from very little matter input (consider the energy released by a hydrogen bomb, which contains kilogram amounts of lithium deuteride). We don't have practical (hydrogen) fusion reactors online yet, but when - or if - we do, they're going to be using miniscule amounts of hydrogen. Perhaps a few tens of kilograms over a year. It's not really a practical source of He. Like the idea though!

If the cost of He even doubled, I know our lab, for one, would dump He as a carrier gas for GC-MS work and switch to UHP Hydrogen. We would get better chromatography and shorter run times. The only thing that stops us is that UHP Hydrogen is just a bit more expensive than UHP Helium.

There is always more of anything available as wealth and technology move forward.

There is more sperm oil available in the seas than at anytime in the last 150 years

That's not technology, that's policy. If we still hunted sperm whales that wouldn't be the case. It was because we recognized the scarcity and imposed the limitation on harvesting whales that we found viable alternatives.

Quote:

There are more proven oil reserves than at any time in the past

But oil isn't being constantly created at the rate which we extract it. Eventually we will run out unless we stop using so much of it. Unless you're one of those abiotic oil kooks who thinks petroleum just magics out of the rocks.

Quote:

There are more trees in the US than at any time in the last 120 yearsThere are more trees in Japan than at anytime in the last 700 yearsThere are more trees in Europe than at anytime in the last 500 years

That's not technology at all, that's purely policy. We still have a high demand for wood, perhaps greater than at any time previously. We just know how to manage our woodlands and tree farms better now that we've seen the problems facing them. Unregulated or loosely regulated use of woodlands for timber deforested much of England during the Age of Exploration, so it's not like running out of wood has no precedence.

Your attitude of "There's always more" reminds me of an episode of Dinosaurs in which the last two of a certain, delicious species of critter were eaten because everyone thought "There's always more; that's what more means!"

But oil isn't being constantly created at the rate which we extract it. Eventually we will run out

Pretty much true for everything that is taken out of the ground. From Iron, platinum to Diamonds. Some of those things can be reused, some things can be created from other stuff but by and large we live on a big ball and everything will be out eventually.

Now some will be out in 20 years, some things in 100 years, some in 100000000 Luckily we have yet to find anything we have run out of. For most things we have yet to scratch the surface.

Take oil. We may have oil left at current velocity of use increase for what 50-60 years? Now we can make oil from coal as well and have enough coal left for 200 years or so on top. And we still have plenty of gas as well which is almost as good. Now there are two things here:

- First we don't want to use all that fossil carbonhydrate anyway that would be pretty shitty for the environment-Second a hundred years ago we had invented flying for 7 years, had found out about radioactivity for 10 and had yet 20 years before antibioticas were invented. We have fossil carbon-hydrates for at least 200 years. If we still rely on oil for primary energy use in 100 years I will be pretty surprised about humanity.

So if we have oil for ever is not the question. The question is if we will be able to replace it when it runs out. And the answer here is a big fat YES. The bigger problem is if we can stop using it earlier because we heat up our planet.

Well, Japan, for instance, has 23.7 million hectares of forest today, and forest density has kept an 1.6% annual increase throughout the last 60 years (University of Helsinki, p.4, 2006). That's a 70% national forest coverage! Peak deforestation in Japan was 1650 (Diamond, "Collapse", p.298).

For a nice overview of how there are now more trees in Japan, the U.S., and Europe, the article "The End of Deforestation?" by the U of H is invaluable.

There is more sperm oil available in the seas than at anytime in the last 150 years

That's not technology, that's policy. If we still hunted sperm whales that wouldn't be the case. It was because we recognized the scarcity and imposed the limitation on harvesting whales that we found viable alternatives.

That's exactly incorrect. Actually, whale oil was used as an illuminant, and, with the depletion of Atlantic whales and decimation of South Seas stocks, whale oil price was skyrocketing; it got to $2.50 a gallon (!). This drove Abraham Gesner to invent and patent Kerosene in 1854 (to be extracted from asphalt at the time) and several visionary investors to form the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, which of course, drilled the first oil well in 1859 that launched an industry and turned whale oil into a redundant and expensive substance (Yergin, The Prize, 1991, Ch. 1).

When stuff becomes expensive, creative entrepreneurs always develop alternatives or find more of whatever is needed, laughingstocks such as Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, or the Club of Rome notwithstanding.

Sounds to me like someone wants to create another artificial bubble in a commodity and run the price up on it, then we'll conveniently find another inexhaustible supply to collapse that bubble. Are we really supposed to believe there is a massive shortage in the second most available element in the universe, only behind hydrogen?

You're trolling, right? Or joking? Or did you just fail to read the article, fail to understand physics and fail to think about your post? No, you must be trolling.

Electrocute water for the hydrogen. Fuse it. Use the helium -- and I know someone mentioned how little hydrogen a fusion reactor uses, but as soon as model rockets can be powered by fusion (probably around 2045), we'll get a massive secondary market. Future crackheads will be stealing model rockets to turn the fused helium into recycling centers instead of breaking into abandoned houses to steal the copper plumbing for their next fix.

See, all you have to do is tie the production of helium to the crack supply somehow and you will never want.

When stuff becomes expensive, creative entrepreneurs always develop alternatives or find more of whatever is needed, laughingstocks such as Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, or the Club of Rome notwithstanding.

Still, helium is much different from hydrocarbons -- there is no shortage of carbon nor one of hydrogen and you can easily replace sperm oil with mineral oil or any oil you can get out of plants. Helium on the other hand is an ELEMENT -- you can't create it (well, apart from fusing hydrogen, which isn't easy at all or even economical). And once used, it is very easily lost forever. Burn a hydrocarbon and you get water and CO2, which sooner or later will end up in new hydrocarbons as long as there are any plants.

This mantra of "When stuff becomes expensive, creative entrepreneurs always develop alternatives or find more of whatever is needed" is just an extrapolation of random historical facts -- it's not a law that is true for all "stuff". And your "always" does not mean what you think it means.

Well, humanity will be just a short episode in the history of this planet anyway. In a few thousand years, probably even much earlier, we will have sucked that planet out like a lemon and will either have gone back to the stone age or left the planet for good -- and I doubt that we will start with leaving early enough to be able to get away as long as we still can do that. We are using up resources that have accumulated over many millions of years within centuries. "Always"... what a joke.

Sounds to me like someone wants to create another artificial bubble in a commodity and run the price up on it, then we'll conveniently find another inexhaustible supply to collapse that bubble. Are we really supposed to believe there is a massive shortage in the second most available element in the universe, only behind hydrogen?

the article you obviously didn't read wrote:

The Earth simply doesn't exert enough gravitational force to keep it on the planet. Once in the atmosphere, helium will migrate to the stratosphere and be lost to space. All the primordial helium in the Earth's vicinity when it formed is long since gone, and only flukes of geology have given us the opportunity to study it on Earth.

Thats nice, I can copy and paste also:

"By chance, the vast majority of these deposits are located in the US, in the Great Plains and the western states. Most of the other sites where helium can be commercially isolated are facilities that liquify natural gas, which leaves helium as a byproduct."

We happen to have an over abundance of Natural gas in the past few years, which surprise surprise, means theres helium there also. In case you've missed T. Boone Pickens plans for the Natural Gas cars because we have such a huge supply, it can replace our gasoline usage and our dependence on foreign oil. If it were true that the Earths gravitational field was to weak to hold on to helium, then why is it still here after billions of years? My point stands on creating an artificial shortage to drive up the commodity price. Just something else to be traded on the open market, like the market they want to set up which is basically a gambling casino, betting on what earnings "Movies" are going to have in their first 6 months at the box office. Worked out real well when they decided that "Health Care" should be publicly owned companies and need to care about ever increasing profits instead of the health needs of their patients. Good old capitalism, everything needs to be commoditised (a profit center) for the wealthy, which eventually chews up the rest of the worker ants (us) disposable income thanks to market manipulation.

If it were true that the Earths gravitational field was to weak to hold on to helium, then why is it still here after billions of years?

It's hard to take you seriously when you question simple facts. Do some research. It's still here after billions of years because it was produced underground by radioactive decay.

Quote:

As the uranium and thorium decay, some of the helium is trapped along with natural gas deposits in certain geological formations. Some of the produced helium seeps out of the Earth's mantle and drifts into the atmosphere, where there is approximately five parts per million of helium. However this helium, as well as any helium ultimately released into the atmosphere by users, drifts up and is eventually lost to the Earth.